The sports fans of Oakland, California, must be smarting. In 2019, they lost their NFL team, the Raiders, to Las Vegas (this after getting them back from Los Angeles in 1995). In that same year of 2019, they watched their NBA team, the Golden State Warriors, move across the bay to San Francisco. Now they’re watching their Major League Baseball (MLB) club, the Athletics – also known as the A’s – move to West Sacramento for the next three seasons before they follow the Raiders to Las Vegas.
Enter the Oakland Ballers – that is, the B’s. This new club is the fruit of “a group of A’s fans, community leaders and more [who] have banded together to steal back Oakland’s baseball legacy.” It has secured $2 million in seed funding from “almost 50 investors with ties to Oakland and the broader East Bay.” It has also taken inspiration from another homegrown club, the Oakland Roots, who play in the National Independent Soccer Association and have introduced “fan ownership.”
The B’s will soon be selling shares in the club and have set up a website where fans and others can get on the waitlist by declaring their likely investment in any of five tranches, ranging from less than $500 to $10,000 or more.
“In addition to the economic rights that go with an investment in the Ballers,” reads the club’s statement, “the Ballers’ new ownership structure will go beyond any previous sports ownership models, offering fans an unprecedented bundle of rights that includes checks and balances on key team decisions including where the team is based, changes to the logos and brandmarks, and even some front office hiring decisions.”
Ballers co-founder Bryan Carmel adds: “Team owners often hold fans hostage, demanding public money for new stadiums, and if they don’t get it, they move the team to a different city that’s willing to pay up. Even if you’re not an Oakland sports fan, you get our frustration because we’ve all seen something we love taken away for someone else’s gain.
The Ballers have become the first club on the West Coast to play in the Pioneer League, which dates back to 1939 and, until 2020, was part of MLB’s minor-league farm system. These days, it is an MLB Partner League, alongside the Frontier League, the American Association and the Atlantic League. As the Ballers explain, “Pioneer League teams sign their own free agents and then have the ability to have any of the 30 MLB teams recruit players off of their teams. This way, the league is still operating as a player development league like it always has been, just in a different form.”
The Ballers are currently playing their inaugural season.
